


Si te alejas de mi

by a_classic_fool



Series: On A Seven-Forty-Seven Boardin' JFK (Nina Verse) [2]
Category: Do No Harm (TV), In the Heights - Miranda
Genre: Graduation, Multi, Plans For The Future, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 13:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12109737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_classic_fool/pseuds/a_classic_fool
Summary: [ON INDEFINITE HIATUS]"You've spent your whole life telling other peoples' stories. You're allowed to tell your own."Or, Nina's graduation from Stanford brings Usnavi, Vanessa, and Ruben to California. All four of them have choices to make about their futures, together and apart.





	Si te alejas de mi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A sequel to [Y si pierdes mis huellas](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11019519/chapters/24556572), but you can read this separately and it will still make sense. Unlike its predecessor, this story will switch between Nina's perspective and Ruben's perspective. 
> 
> No warnings for this chapter, but I'll add warnings and tags as necessary!

The phone call came on a Wednesday afternoon and Nina knew who it was as soon as she saw the unfamiliar number light up the screen. Graceless in her haste, she unfolded herself from the armchair where she’d been sitting and snatched the phone before it could vibrate off the edge of the coffee table. She cradled it in her cupped hand for the briefest of moments, acutely aware of the conversation she was about to have and unsure of which way she wanted it to go.

“Hello?”

“Hi there! I’m calling for Nina Rosario.”

“This is Nina.”

For the next several minutes, Nina found herself nodding repeatedly into the phone before remembering no one could see her and switching to generic noises of assent instead.

Eventually, she asked, “How long do I have to decide?”

“If you could let us know of your decision within a week, that’d be great.”

“Should I just call back at this number?”

“That’ll work!” A rustling of paper and the tapping of a keyboard on the other end and then, “It’s been great talking to you, Nina.”

Her phone beeped in her ear to indicate the call had ended.

Nina, perched on the very edge of her chair, dropped her phone on her lap and rested her elbows on her knees, her forehead against the heel of her hand. The walls were bare for the first time since September, their erstwhile decorations buried in one of the bulging cardboard boxes in the common room, and that knowledge tugged painfully at something deep in her chest.

None of her three roommates were home, although evidence of their recent presence was everywhere. A pile of Rosa’s clothes took up half the couch — _I’m going to sell them, I swear!_ — and a giant paper bag of class notes that she intended to recycle sat by the door.  Xochi’s packing tape and Sharpies lay in the middle of the floor, frozen in time as though she’d just now set them down and gone to get something from her room. Abigail’s door was open and a trail of jeans and socks and t-shirts lined the pathway from her room to the bathroom, evidence of how late she’d woken up this morning and how displeased she’d been with every outfit she’d tried on.

Classes had ended, all their theses were submitted, there was nothing left to do but pack and think and maybe get drunk. But the four of them had already taken several celebratory daytrips — a late-night bottle of tequila passed back and forth at Fort Mason, sand shaken out of their clothes after swimming past the waves in Santa Cruz, an afternoon spent lost and sweaty in the redwoods several hours south — and Nina felt like she was going to vibrate out of her skin.

Eventually, she gave up on sitting still and went to her room for her bike helmet. Her cap and gown, hanging over the door of her closet, sent the usual jolt of terror and nostalgia through her body — it was an odd thing, to be homesick for a place she hadn’t left. Every minute felt elongated and unspeakably brief at the same time, as though it were somehow being drawn out just so she would be aware of when it ended. Whenever she opened the window, she ran her hands over its frame, breathed the scent of the trembling spring through the screen; whenever she walked along the roads that bisected and encircled and traversed the campus, she was reminded how little time there was left to memorize their twists and turns. Four days. Three days. Two.

Nina gathered bag and helmet and slipped from the suite, made her way down the stairs and out into the courtyard. The late afternoon light filtered through the trees, casting mottled shadows on the red-tiled roofs, and the day felt like a catalog of everything she might forget. She unlocked her bike and stared at the cable in her hands, at the dust and pollen gathered on the metal of the bike’s frame. She’d been planning on selling it — she had no desire to haul it back to New York with her — and she felt unexpectedly dizzy, as though the ground were suddenly much farther away from her head than it had been a few moments before.

 _It’s a fucking bike_ , said the rational part of her brain, sounding remarkably like Vanessa. _Get a fucking grip._

But it wasn’t really about the bike, and Nina knew it. She’d prepared herself to leave so much behind — the bike, the campus, the dust and sprawl of California — and it seemed unfathomable, just then, to stay. She’d committed. She’d _decided_ , as much as it had wrenched and clawed at her insides to do it, and one phone call seemed inconsequential compared to the weight of that decision. How could she possibly go back inside, climb the stairs to her suite, collapse on her bed, with the anticipation of endless time? With the knowledge that when Vanessa and Usnavi and Ruben arrived the next day, it might be another six months, another year, before she saw them again?

It had made so much sense, when her parents suggested it. Did she have a job in California? No. Had she gotten into grad school in California? Also no. Why not go back to New York? What was keeping her here?

Internally cursing her past self, Nina rode down Governor’s Avenue to the dry, empty lake. Several drunk seniors lounged by the side of it, laughing and pouring vodka into cups, and Nina locked her bike and paced the lake’s perimeter, restless and upset and in desperate need of someone to talk to.

 _When you have a problem you come home,_ she remembered her mother saying, but that was the problem in and of itself. She’d reached the point in her life, she knew, where going home wouldn’t be enough to fix things — she wouldn’t solve anything by returning to New York, curling up in her childhood bed, eating _arroz con gandules_ and _empanadillas_ and letting her parents stroke her hair until she felt better. Her life demanded decisions and she did not want to make them.

Eventually, Nina sat cross-legged on the grass under an oak tree and called her parents before she could talk herself out of it.

“Hello?” said her mother’s voice.

“Hi Mom.”

“Nina! _Mija_!” Her mother barely shifted the receiver away from her mouth before yelling, _¡Kevin, es Nina!_ down the hallway from where the phone hung on the wall. Nina winced. Neither of her parents had ever bothered toning down their enthusiasm when she called.

Nina’s father said something unintelligible in the background before her mother launched into a stream of questions about what to pack, about California weather, about airport security, about Usnavi and Vanessa and what time they were arriving. Neither of Nina’s parents had ever been to California and under normal circumstances, her mother’s excitement would have been infectious.

“And we’ll have a big dinner the night we get back, the whole barrio, to celebrate,” said Camila, after several minutes. “Your abuela flies in the next day, it’ll be our last chance before we’ve got one more person living in the house.”

“How is Abuela?” asked Nina, chewing guiltily on a hangnail.

“She’ll be alright,” said Camila, in a softer voice. “It’s hard — well. She misses your abuelo, son of a bitch or not. And I’m sure it’s awful, being alone.”

“Why’s she still in Puerto Rico? Why hasn’t she come already?”

“Sorting out the house.” After an uncomfortable pause, Camila added, “And there was the funeral.”

Nina knew her parents had paid for her abuelo’s funeral, and she knew it could not have been cheap. Her father hadn’t been back to Puerto Rico more than a few times since he first got on a plane to New York and part of Nina was glad she hadn’t been home when he returned this time — she didn’t know how it would have felt to see her father angry and grieving, slamming doors and mourning a man who’d once slapped him across the face for wanting to be something other than a farmer.

“She’ll be so happy to have you here,” Camila said finally. “She barely knows you — she’ll get a chance to learn who you are. She was always kinder, when he wasn’t around.”

 _Now is your fucking chance_ , Nina yelled at herself, in her head. _It’ll only getting worse from here._

“ _I’ll_ be so happy to have you here,” said her mother, before she could open her mouth. “It’s been — it’s better, when you’re home. For all of us.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Nina, in a strangled sort of voice.

“ _Te quiero,_ Nina.”

“ _Te quiero, Mamá._ ”

Nina answered questions about graduation for several more minutes until eventually, for the second time that day, her phone beeped in her ear. She leaned back against the oak tree behind her and felt her insides shrivel in shame. She hadn’t told them. She _couldn’t_ tell them. She pictured driving them to campus from the airport, or meeting them at their hotel, and saying, _I might not be coming back to New York. I might not be helping with Abuela._ She pictured the look on her father’s face — bereft, open, surprised — and she wanted to curl up in the grass and postpone graduation indefinitely.

Nina rode to the dining hall without realizing what she was doing, filled her plate and ate before she could properly register the food on her fork. She made her way back to Governor’s Corner in the fading light, sat on a bench outside her building, stared at what she could see of the horizon between the rooftops that blocked her view. The sun set late this time of year and the sky took hours to fade from gold to gray to navy. Forty-five minutes north and the fog would be rolling in, heavy and solid as a wave, to settle on the struts of the Golden Gate; an hour south and the motionless heat of the Silicon Valley would have broken and given way to the mountains and the winding roads that crossed them.

But here, in Palo Alto, everything just got quiet at night. Shops closed early, the residential streets were hushed and calm. It was the kind of stillness Nina associated with a particular brand of wealth, the kind that refused of the chaos of a city and the sleepless neon nights of New York.

Nina lost track of how long she’d been sitting outdoors and was only reminded to go back to her suite when a pair of freshman walked by, voices rapid and high-pitched with the relief of having finished exams.

“Nina!” said Xochi, once Nina was inside. Xochi smelled of whiskey and rum at the same time and she smiled at Nina with her whole body as soon as Nina pushed open the door. She took Nina’s hands in her own and spun them both in a circle, tipping her head back and letting her long hair swirl out behind her.  “Dance with us.”

Abigail, who had neither a sense of rhythm nor a concept of beat, was chewing on her lip in deep concentration as Rosa attempted, for what had to be at least the twentieth time that year, to lead her through a basic salsa step. Half-empty bags of cookies and chips were strewn across the coffee table and, from the smell of it, someone had poured all the suite’s remaining alcohol into a single bowl. Nina picked up a cup and drank some. It tasted vile but it warmed her from throat to stomach and left an odd, numb calm behind.

It felt good to stop thinking for an hour, to dance until she was too tired to dance and then collapse on the couch to watch Rosa freestyle. It felt good to go boneless and to let Xochi flop drunkenly across her lap. Abigail pulled up Netflix on her computer and they all curled up in a pile to watch, their breathing going slow and even until their chests rose and fell in unison.

Eventually, once everyone else had gone to bed and Nina had retreated to her room, she sat down at her desk and opened her laptop. Tucking her feet up onto the chair underneath her and taking a deep breath, she pulled up a web page she hadn’t looked at in months, mostly to avoid the reminder of what she’d been sure was imminent failure.

 _Berkeley Law_ , said the web page, in sensible blue letters. And below that, in smaller font: _University of California._ She hadn’t even told anyone she’d applied.

She thought about the voice on the phone, calm and generic — _We’re so pleased to be able to offer you admission —_ and, involuntarily, wondered who’d given up the spot that meant she’d gotten off the waitlist. What were they doing now? Were they, too, staring at a computer screen by lamplight and panicking about the future? Were they on a plane, in a foreign country, far away from Palo Alto? Nina imagined a faceless figure standing on a beach in Puerto Rico, arms spread wide, a sweeping gesture that turned everything in its wake to ash. She had to admit that the idea of running, of simply getting up and leaving everything behind, had its appeal. She could walk away if she wanted to. She could vanish and ignore the burning wreckage at her back.

In the end, Nina fell asleep at her desk and woke two hours late to the thoroughly jarring combination of her blaring alarm and the insistent buzzing of about twenty texts from Vanessa.  

 _Vanessa, 2:16 am  
_ leaving the apt soon hopefully. usnavi is being impossible.

 _Vanessa, 2:18 am  
_ ok, maybe not that soon. will keep you posted if we miss this fucking flight.

 _Vanessa, 3:15 am  
_ through security, thank god.

 _Vanessa, 4:27 am  
_ on the plane. everyone is melting the actual fuck down. send help.

 _Vanessa, 10:02 am  
_ landed. i want coffee and something fried.

 _Vanessa, 10:34 am  
_ ok, we’re at arrivals! where are you??

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come hang out with me on Tumblr at [a-classic-fool](https://a-classic-fool.tumblr.com/)! Comments soothe my fragile ego and make my heart happy.


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